Spain’s Telefonica launched a commercial I-mode service on Thursday, while Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA agreed Wednesday to become the exclusive provider of I-mode services in Italy, DoCoMo said in separate statements.
Look how traditional chemical photo service providers have realigned themselves to handle digi prints; this is a new and growing line of business. With DoCoMo’s 505-series i-modes phones (due to hit the market early summer), handsets will have very high-quality, mega-pixel-class cameras, so cam-phone users will want to buy more of the services that digi-cam users have already been buying – like kiosk printing. And to those who would cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war I reply: cry freedom – and put a keitai in every back pocket.
If at first you don’t succeed, then try again – or so says NTT DoCoMo. I-mode, NTT’s mobile multimedia messaging service, was launched in Germany, Holland and Belgium almost a year ago by network operator KPN NV (KPN), but consumers weren’t keen. Now, the Japanese mobile network operator is launching i-mode in France and Spain, and is hoping this second European push succeeds.
By platform, mobile games (mostly Java, as far as we could see) represented 9.2 percent of the 393 new titles announced at the TGS, a significant if yet modest chunk of the overall game market. This was up steeply from 4.1 percent of 339 titles at the fall 2001 show, but still not equal to the 11.0, 14.7, and 17.1 percent shares seen at the spring 2001 (309 new titles), fall 2000 (334 new titles), and spring 2000 (380 new titles) shows, respectively. We have lots of Java screen savers,” said Taito Corporation at the DoCoMo booth; Seoul-based game maker GameVIL comes ashore to leverage made-in-Korea BREW expertise (KTF’s BREW allows 200KB downloads — the standard for KDDI to beat?); and advice on creating successful Java services from PCCW: “Prepare a good environment for the developers.” Daniel had a splitting headache, but this program rocks!
